Gerhard Richter citations (96 citations)

“I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation”

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Gerhard Richter

on the art academy in Düsseldorf
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

“Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context – which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection.”

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Gerhard Richter

Quote from Richter's letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6
1970's

“I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

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Gerhard Richter

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 19 July 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

“My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.”

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Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going – being lost, being a loser – reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.”

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Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

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Gerhard Richter

Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to nl:Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9
1970's
Variante: It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.

“The abstracts are the opposite to work on. That process is more like walking, step by step, without an intention, until you discover where you are going. When I paint a landscape from a photograph or an image like this one, I can see the end point before I start, although in fact it always turns out slightly different than I imagined. What I have is not facility, because this really doesn't take skill. I have an eye. I couldn't make a drawing of you sitting here right now. I would love to have that ability, in the same way that I would love to play the piano. Virtuosity is a precondition for pianists, but in addition you have to be good. These are not the same thing.”

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Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass [like in his work '4 Panes of Glass', 1967], etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 86, note 12

“Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.”

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Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1960's

“All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 93, note 24

“Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.”

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Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1988; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1980's

“Their permanent presence [of the old traditional paintings out of the past] compels us to produce something different, which is neither better nor worse, but which has to be different because we painted the Isenheim Alter [of Grünewald, 14th century] yesterday.... the better we know tradition – i. e., ourselves and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we will make similar, and the better things we will make different.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 107, note 60

“I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it… I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures.”

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Gerhard Richter

In 1988, Richter painted a series of 15 works titled 'October 18, 1977.' It shocked Germany, especially left. The series was based on photographs of the anti-capitalist Baader-Meinhof group, which called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) and were in prison and died in 1977.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“The first impulse towards painting, or toward art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one's own vision, to deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meanings.) Without this, all work would be pointless and unjustified, like Art for Art's Sake.”

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Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.... it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 106, note 58

“Art is the highest form of hope.”

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Gerhard Richter

in text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1980's

“This one is too elegant, too shiny, like jewelry. It seeks applause. This is clear to me, but difficult to explain, which is what makes abstraction so fascinating. In one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it's garbage. But somehow we see something in it; we have a sense of quality. [searching for an illustration of his point, Richter leafs through a catalog to find some of his 'gray monochromes']. I was doing these [monochromes] when I was getting divorced. When you feel totally empty, you do this - but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe.”

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Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'... By 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves.”

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Gerhard Richter

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 108, note 61

“The sciences certainly have influenced the arts. To an Aztec, the sunset was an inexplicable event, which he could not cope with or even survive without the imagined aid of his gods. Obvious phenomena of this sort have since been explained. But the sheer unimagined vastness of the explicable has now made the inexplicable into such a monstrous thing that our heads spin, and the old images burst like bubbles. The thought of the totally inexplicable (as when we look at the starry sky), and the impossibility of reading any sense into this monstrous vastness, so affect us that we need ignorance to survive.”

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Gerhard Richter

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.”

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Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7
1980's

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”

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Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Techniques' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5
1960's

“This time the entire floor is covered with cut-up illustrated journals, a new tic and trick of mine (eight days now): I cut out photos from illustrated journals and dissolve them with a chemical solution and swipe and smear them. That is fabulous fun. I have always loved illustrated magazines, perhaps because of their documentary actuality. I have also already made a few attempts to paint something like that in a larger format. Curious to see how it will continue. I am pursuing something which in a certain way resembles the most recent movement: Pop art (from popular), probably came up in America and is now heating up the minds here.”

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Gerhard Richter

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 10 March 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

“In [19]'46, I had started to awaken to the world. At first, the Russians nationalized everything [in East-Germany / DDR]. Rich people had their property taken away, and the people got access to their libraries, which was wonderful for me. I read Hermann Hesse. Thomas Mann was a little too heavy for me. But Lombroso, Nietzsche. Materialists, I would call them – writers who said there was no god, no spirit, that freedom is an illusion. That affected me deeply.”

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Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“The 'Grey Pictures' were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere. I painted them nonetheless... Not Kelly, but Bob Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Yves Klein and many others.”

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Gerhard Richter

In an interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, 1986
Richter was asked about his 'Monochrome Grey Pictures and Abstract Pictures' and their connection with the artists Yves Klein and Ellsworth Kelly.
1980's

“The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own.”

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Gerhard Richter

Quote of Richter from an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, 2006; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6
after 2000

“I suppose they also had to do with my father, the Nazis, being skeptical of all systems, all manias. In the 70's, political positions were so clearly split in Germany - the country was so divided over the Baader-Meinhof group - and I was annoyed by both sides. In terms of what I expressed in the paintings, that seemed my only choice, not because I wanted to be ambiguous but because I myself don't know how to answer these difficult questions. That was what I was conveying.”

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Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.”

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Gerhard Richter

Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1960's

“In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all – that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas.”

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Gerhard Richter

Quote of an interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Atlas' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/atlas-4
1990's